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Oracle's Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison on Thursday launched an attack on his company's competitors with new servers, appliances, and software, and personally unveiled new server performance numbers he said destroys HP's "TurtleDome" server.

Among the product offerings Ellison introduced are new versions of SPARC-based servers, as well as the next version of its Solaris operating system and a SPARC-based version of its Exalogic Elastic Cloud appliance.

Ellison said that Oracle's new SPARC Supercluster server, when configured with 108 SPARC T3 processors with 1,728 cores, 13.5 TBs of memory, 40-Gbps InfiniBand, and Oracle ZFS storage, and running a standard Oracle database, has reached 30 million transactions per minute, based on the tpmC benchmark.

That performance compares to 10 million transactions per minute for an IBM P7 server cluster, and 4 million transactions per minute achieved by the HP Superdome server, which Ellison called the "HP TurtleDome."

He then half-heartedly apologized for offending the competition. "We just have better products," he said. "And they're just far behind. . . . We think (HP's) vulnerable, and we're going after them."

However, Ellison admitted that the Oracle Supercluster the company used to get the high performance benchmark numbers will not fit into many customer data centers.

"This configuration was huge," he said. "I'm not sure anyone will order this configuration."

Ellison also introduced Oracle's Sunrise program of combining its SPARC processor technology and Solaris operating system to lead its future product developments to describe how Oracle and Sun combined is outpacing its competition in terms of performance and availability.

"For all of our competitors who have been enjoying their 'Sundown' and 'Sunout' programs, this is all ending," he said. "This is the Sunrise."

The new hardware and software introduced on Tuesday all came from the legacy Sun side of Oracle. Oracle in January acquired Sun Microsystems and has since moved to optimize its software and hardware platforms to work in an appliance-like manner.

Underlying the new Sun hardware are two new families of SPARC processors, including the SPARC T3-4, a 16-core version of the T3, which was used in the Oracle Supercluster.